US news | The Guardian

Supporters fear Su, the deputy labor secretary, might have a hard time getting the needed Senate votes as some business groups oppose her nominationJulie Su has come a long way since she first made headlines in 1995 when she, then just 26 years old, was lead lawyer for 72 Thai workers who were essentially kept in slavery, toiling 18 hours a day at a sweatshop just outside Los Angeles.Last week Joe Biden nominated Su to be secretary of labor, the government’s top labor position, a move that many labor, immigrant and women’s groups vigorously cheered, while a few business groups – but not many – opposed the nomination. Now some supporters fear that she might have a hard time mustering the needed votes in the Senate to be confirmed. Continue reading...

The new code revised 120-year-old criminal laws, but the effort was stymied by Joe Biden and an unlikely alliance of Republicans and DemocratsIn Washington DC, the law prohibits the playing of bandy and “shindy” in the streets, the arson of one’s own steamboat and potentially even being a “common scold” – a common law offense levied against those who quarreled with their neighbors.Aware of the need to clean up this 120-year-old criminal code, lawyers in America’s capital city have spent more than a decade and a half going through the law books in a modernization campaign described by those involved as long overdue, only to see the effort stymied this week at the hands of Joe Biden and an unlikely alliance of Republicans and Democrats. Continue reading...

The Twitter owner’s latest public debacle over a sacked worker can only do more damage to the company’s future prosperityAs someone who wishes Twitter didn’t exist, I am obviously an enormous fan of Elon Musk. He seems to be running it like one of those central London pubs that get bought by property developers who then have to prove the business is unviable in order to win planning permission to turn it into flats. I apologise for the length of that simile, but it’s an interesting comparison. Those stealth-saboteur landlords have to keep it plausible. The business must fail by doing the sort of thing an idiot might sincerely believe would succeed. Live music, an open mic night, potato wedges instead of chips, that sort of thing.Musk’s Twitter approach is very plausible. He tried to back out of taking over the firm, but then there was a court case and he was forced to buy it and it was both intergalactically expensive and losing money at a dazzling rate. Hence he seems desperate to cut costs and ramp up revenue. On the face of it, that’s a solid business strategy. Well, almost – it would be, but for the word “seems”. All businesses, whether they’re losing money or making it, want to cut costs and increase revenue, but they have to be wary of seeming too much that they do – especially if they’re in the leisure sector. Even the property developer’s pub must stop short of advertising that they’re now selling worse beer at a higher cost or that they’ve got rid of most of the kitchen staff so you should expect long waits if you order food. Continue reading...

Many of my clients are doubtful of a four-day work week. But embrace it – it’s a carrot to dangle, and it’ll help you attract talentWhen I ask my clients about the four-day work week I generally get the same response: the eye roll.“Let me see if I understand this,” they will inevitably say. “The employee works for four days, but I pay them for five, right? Thanks, I’m out.” Continue reading...

Protesters ask ‘Mayor Andre Dickens – is this enough Black folks for you?’ in demonstration against $90m training centerKamau Franklin stood in midtown Atlanta on a recent chilly, drizzly night, held a microphone and addressed a crowd that had peacefully marched a mile to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation – the organization behind the $90m police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”.“[Atlanta] Mayor Andre Dickens – is this enough Black folks for you?” he began, with several dozen Atlanta police department officers standing behind him, most with riot helmets and some with long guns, guarding the entrance to the 50-story building. Continue reading...

Leftwing Democrats say defense spending is far too high and query president’s request for more money for border securityProgressive Democrats have welcomed large chunks of Joe Biden’s latest budget request, but there is also anger and disappointment on key issues that the left of the party holds dear, notably defense spending and immigration policy.On Thursday, the president outlined his vision for the next fiscal year, proposing a total budget of $6.8tn, which would decrease the federal deficit by nearly $3tn through a series of tax increases on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Continue reading...

The co-director of the Lesbian Project, launched last week, tells why the ‘L’ of LGBTQ+ must not be allowed to disappear into the rainbow soupLGBTQ+ activism is everywhere in modern Britain. Alongside lesbians, gay men and bisexual people, each year new orientations and identities arrive to shelter under the rainbow umbrella – from trans and nonbinary to intersex, asexual, polyamorous, queer and beyond. At a distance, it all looks admirably progressive. But when considered a bit more closely, it seems that lesbians – the “L” ostensibly at the front of the LGBTQ+ movement – are badly missing out. In policymaking, the charity sector, academic research, data collection, media representation and political attention – to name but a few areas – lesbians have fallen to the back of the queue.Pride is the emotion usually associated with the rainbow coalition and there are certainly many historic achievements for LGBTQ+ activists to feel proud of. Still, not much attention has been paid to the question of how well the interests of distinct member groups are identified and prioritised, once they are under the rainbow umbrella. A lot of money, resources and public attention flow into this sector – but how exactly are the spoils divided? Continue reading...

In attacking the new asylum policy, Gary Lineker has left a stricken BBC floundering and shown the Tory right how it is misjudging BritainThe Conservative party and its media outriders have overreached themselves in the Lineker affair. The “stop the boats” policy, which flouts democratic, legal and humanitarian standards to reach new heights of cruelty in our proposed treatment of asylum seekers, is not just another political controversy. It goes to the heart of what kind of country we are and how policy should be conducted in a democracy. Authoritarian regimes everywhere progress by breaching one convention as a launchpad for breaching the next until, finally, they land their prize of subordinating human rights to their partisan and untrammelled will. But human rights are indivisible; one breach leaves the rest diminished and weakened.No less fundamental in a democracy are the rules of engagement in the public square. Debate, however passionate, must respect facts. While our broadcast media are regulated to serve that end, upheld by a system of public service broadcasting of which the BBC is the anchor, our newspapers are not. Newspapers, particularly of the right, have increasingly been edited not as journals but as propagandists of rightwing ideology in which facts are subordinate, serving profoundly political ends. The callous extremes of the “stop the boats” scheme could not have been conceived, nor the extravagant language used to defend it, without the poisonous climate they created. They are necessarily ardent critics of the BBC, even stricken and enfeebled as it is, because it stands in the way of how they want to frame political and cultural argument – part of the march towards the unconstrained exercise of executive privilege, the attacks on human rights and the diminution of our democracy. Continue reading...

Beijing is following Vladimir Putin’s aggressive playbook. The US can counter the march of the autocrats, but only if it stops feeding their paranoiaIs there a school for autocrats? As if by rote, authoritarian leaders around the world trot out remarkably similar justifications for their repressive actions, democratic deficits and policy failures. These typically include scary claims that their country is under attack by foreign forces and saboteurs or is the victim of a global conspiracy.Perhaps they have all taken an online correspondence course for aspiring dictators. Tyrants R Us. Continue reading...

His celebration of the mundane reflected the beginnings of a modern sensibilityThere is a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead in which the main character, John Ames, a pastor, walking to his church, comes across a young couple in the street. “The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet,” he recalls. The young man ahead of him “jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress”. It was “a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth”. In such moments, “it is easy to believe… that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash”.It is a wonderful, luminous passage, typical of Robinson’s ability to discover the lyrical even within the mundane. Deeply Christian, and Calvinist, there is in her writing a spiritual force that springs from her faith. She would probably describe that scene as the discovery of a divine presence in the world. And yet, flowing out of that scene, is also an awareness that transcends the religious. It is the uncovering of something very human, a celebration of our ability to find the poetic in our simplest activities. Continue reading...

Donald Trump is exiled in Florida but he was made in New York – in part by a friendship with a controversial baseball ownerWhen Donald Trump was looking to make his mark in 1980s Manhattan, he found a role model up in the Bronx: the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Trump was also a professional team owner: his New Jersey Generals competed in the short-lived United States Football League. But though Trump and Steinbrenner would ultimately become good friends, they didn’t get off to the best start.As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times writes in her bestselling book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the two men sat on the board of the New York State Sportsplex Corporation, which was looking into building new stadiums. Trump was eyeing one in Queens, where the Generals could play. Continue reading...

His appearance comes as the inquiry into the $130,000 the former president paid to Stormy Daniels comes to an endMichael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and intermediary in the Stormy Daniels hush-money affair, is scheduled to testify before a Manhattan grand jury on Monday about payments made to the adult film performer, according to a report on Saturday.Cohen’s appearance before a grand jury convened by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg comes as prosecutors are believed to be nearing the end of an investigation into payments totaling $130,000 that Trump made to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to stop her discussing their alleged affair. Continue reading...

This shouldn’t need to be said in 2023, but forcing teenagers to become parents isn’t good for the teenagers, the baby or society in generalCongratulations to Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert who is becoming a grandma at the tender age of 36. Speaking at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Moms for America event on Tuesday, the Colorado congresswoman shared the news that her 17-year-old son is expecting a baby with his teenage girlfriend in April. Continue reading...

As the BBC crisis snowballs, it is obvious that director general Tim Davie and those who pushed him into error misread the public moodImpartiality is a knotty old concept, and one of the trickiest things about it is that it relies on the idea that you can safely find the middle ground. Witness the agonised attempts by the BBC and the Labour party to land on that sweet spot of unimpeachable banality after radical centrist firebrand Gary Lineker’s tweets became a rightwing media obsession this week. Instead of establishing themselves as the trusted representatives of the median voter or viewer, they have ceded moral authority to a man who spent last Sunday commentating on Nottingham Forest v Everton.That’s Steve Wilson, one of the Match of the Day commentators who on Friday announced that they would be stepping back from their duties this weekend in solidarity with Lineker. Post-match analysis and player interviews will also be missing. The version of the BBC’s football highlights show that will be on air as a result – and the enforced dropping of Saturday’s Football Focus after its presenter Alex Scott, pulled out – is the natural endpoint of the position that the corporation has so painfully staked out for itself: a (political!) football fizzing about without much sense of why, or what the stakes are. Give up on meaningful analysis in pursuit of neutrality and the result is a version of events which is uncontroversial, certainly, but also difficult to understand. Continue reading...

Heavy snow has wrought calamity across the state; burying roads and houses, disrupting power and snapping branches off treesBlake Heauser’s chainsaw slowly rumbled quiet. Sounds of tall trees splintering and crashing under the weight of the freshly fallen snow cut through the stillness, as the latest round of winter weather bore down on the town, tucked into the foothills in northern California. He had cleared a path through the wooded debris for now but with more storms in the forecast it might not last.Heauser had spent days trying to remove fallen trees from the roads that snaked through the hillsides in his community in Grass Valley, even as those roads disappeared under the heavy snow. He and others worked around the clock to ensure vulnerable neighbors could either evacuate or were able to safely remain in their buried homes, while grappling with the effects of prolonged and widespread power outages that left some without heat or pumped well water. Continue reading...

Art freed our minds and helped us survive. It cannot be right to argue that, even now, the fruits of our creativity belong to the state

Ancient classics can reinforce patriarchal lies about women, but they also take us back to the origins of pernicious narrativesLast week, I found myself – at the end of a gloomy day – shot through with a burst of fierce, electric energy. It came from watching Sophie Okonedo’s 90 minutes of flat-out fury as she played Medea, opposite Ben Daniels’s Jason, in Dominic Cooke’s production of the Euripides play.Afterwards, I registered the fact that the woman sitting by me had actually put her hands over her face when Medea decided to murder her own children. I, on the other hand, had not. Why did I mentally urge her on towards the unspeakable deeds, inwardly channelling all the pent-up anti-patriarchal rage at my disposal? Wasn’t there something deeply disturbing about that? Or was the play precisely doing its job in Aristotelian terms: providing a catharsis? Continue reading...

The April showdown between Gervonta Davis and Ryan Garcia is one of the biggest fights that can be made today. It’s also a depressing reminder of boxing’s tolerance for criminalityGervonta Davis, the World Boxing Association’s lightweight champion and one of America’s most prodigiously gifted young athletes, is the type of homegrown talent with a rags-to-riches backstory, crowd-pleasing style and unvarnished authenticity that makes US television executives water at the mouth.The west Baltimore native came up the hard way through abject poverty, foster care and group homes, learned to box under the trainer who inspired the character of Dennis ‘Cutty’ Wise in The Wire and became the sport’s second-youngest world champion at just 22 years old. Since then, he’s moved the needle like few other US prizefighters in recent memory, capturing versions of world titles across three different weight classes and selling out arenas from coast to coast. A southpaw endowed with concussive power in both hands and a granite chin, Davis is unbeaten in 29 professional outings with 27 knockouts, his status as a crossover attraction only climbing with each successive fight. When his sixth-round TKO of Rolando Romero broke the live gate record at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last year, Madonna watched from ringside. Continue reading...

Now in control of the House, Republicans are making light of the violence of the day and assailing the investigation into the Capitol attackIt might be thought that Republicans would prefer not to remind Americans of the day their president nearly destroyed US democracy.But the party’s right wing is going all in to rewrite the history of the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and to make political martyrs of those imprisoned for assaulting police officers and sending politicians fleeing as the mob attempted to stop Congress from endorsing Joe Biden’s election victory. Continue reading...

Owner finds unruly visitor in place of chihuahua-dachshund, Squeakers, who narrowly survived encounter with wildcatAt first, Nikola Zovko thought the creature curled up in his dog Squeakers’s deluxe, heated dog bed was just one of his cats. “I said, ‘Fuzzerhead, what’re you doing in Squeakers’s bed?’” he said. And that’s when it registered. “Oh that’s not Fuzzerhead. That’s a real life bobcat.”In the week since, Zovko and his family lost and found their beloved pup Squeakers, a 10-year-old chihuahua-dachshund mix. After discovering that he had been mauled by the bobcat who stole his throne, they raised enough money for surgeries to restore him to health. The local game and fish department has used their story as an example of what to do when wildlife wander in to your home. Continue reading...

Deaths of two of four Americans kidnapped in Matamoros place spotlight on cartels’ impunity – and on medical tourismLatavia “Tay” Washington McGee had scheduled an abdominal operation that many mothers have, and she chose to have the operation done in Mexico, where medical costs are cheaper – and where she had previously gone for other cosmetic procedures.A cousin and a couple of friends joined her to share the 1,400-mile drive from her home town of Lake City, South Carolina, to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, just south of the US-Mexico frontier. Continue reading...

Rightwing governor of Florida – and most likely rival to Trump for the 2024 nomination – promotes his book in the early voting stateThe Republican Ron DeSantis greeted fans in Iowa on Friday, marking the Florida governor’s first visit this election cycle to the early voting state and intensifying speculation over when he might announce his 2024 presidential bid.DeSantis delivered remarks to a full crowd at a casino in Davenport on Friday morning, and later appeared in Des Moines with the governor of Iowa, Republican Kim Reynolds, to promote his new book, The Courage to be Free. Continue reading...

Zohreh Sadeghi, 33, and Mohammed Naseri, 35, found dead along with Texas trucker Ramin Khodakaramrezaei who died by suicideA Texas truck driver allegedly broke into the home of a woman who hosted a podcast to which he listened and killed her as well as her husband before dying by suicide in what authorities are describing as a stalking case.Authorities identified the victims as 33-year-old podcaster Zohreh Sadeghi and her husband Mohammed Naseri, 35, according to the Daily Beast. The suspect, meanwhile, is Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, a 38-year-old trucker. Continue reading...

State officials launch lawsuit against wealthy city of Huntington Beach to force it to build new homesCalifornia officials are suing Huntington Beach, a wealthy coastal city lambasted by the state’s governor as the “poster child for nimbyism”, in an attempt to force it to build more affordable housing.Defiant Huntington Beach officials have filed their own lawsuit in response, pledging to fight any attempt by the state to “urbanize” their affluent, majority-white community. Continue reading...

Several flood advisories issued as governor declares states of emergency in 21 counties, with more snow set for higher areasThere is no end in sight for California’s brutally wet winter as yet another atmospheric river storm collided with the state on Friday, bringing torrential downpours, thunderstorms and wind. The National Weather Service issued a slew of flash flood warnings and watches for already inundated areas from the San Francisco Bay, to the central coast and the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, with more stormy weather expected through the weekend.Snow-covered mountain towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills braced for another round of heavy precipitation. So much snow has fallen across the ranges that residents are still struggling to dig out days after earlier storms; now, warmer rains are threatening more damage to towns and buildings by adding more weight to snow-heavy roofs that could cause them to crumple. Continue reading...

Queen Latifah and Pia Wilson take part in celebration of abolitionist in New Jersey cityNewark’s Mayor Ras Baraka, community leaders and celebrities including the musician and actor Queen Latifah and writer Pia Wilson led celebrations of a new monument to the abolitionist Harriet Tubman this week. The ceremony was a historic final step in replacing a Christopher Columbus statue that was removed from a square in the New Jersey city following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.Gone is an ode to Columbus, who engaged in the kidnapping, enslavement and killing of Indigenous people in the Caribbean. Instead is now a depiction of Tubman, a legendary racial justice activist. Known as the “Moses of her people”, Tubman, who escaped slavery herself, helped other enslaved people gain their freedom amid great danger, acting as what was known as a conductor of the Underground Railroad during the civil war. Continue reading...

E Jean Carroll can use tape of former president boasting of touching women’s genitals without consent in New York trialThe tape of Donald Trump boasting about sexual aggression towards women that detonated late in the 2016 election campaign but did not prevent him from winning the presidency will be permitted at a forthcoming civil trial in New York.A federal judge ruled on Friday that the columnist E Jean Carroll can use the 2005 remarks by Trump, caught on tape in conversation with an Access Hollywood TV show personality, in support of her lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Continue reading...

Jack Draper faces a test of his form and fitness against Dan Evans – Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray also in actionAs the best tennis players in the world converged on the California desert for the Indian Wells Masters last year, Jack Draper was not among them. He was making significant progress and had won three ATP Challenger events early in the season, but was scrapping in the lower levels of the sport, still waiting to make the definitive step up.This year marks Draper’s arrival at the top of tennis, his first full season on the ATP Tour, and the tests will keep on coming. On Saturday in Indian Wells he will take part in an all-British second-round battle against Dan Evans, the 24th seed. Continue reading...

Jewish American leaders urged US to block visit of Bezalel Smotrich, who has described himself as a ‘fascist homophobe’The Biden administration has granted a US visa to Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, over the objection of Jewish American leaders who said he should be barred from the country for his call to “wipe out” a Palestinian town.The US state department gave Smotrich a diplomatic visa to speak at an investment conference in Washington DC on Sunday, and for meetings with the International Monetary Fund, after concluding that it would be highly unusual to refuse one to a member of the government of a close ally. But the White House said no US officials will meet him or attend the conference. Continue reading...

Number is lower than January’s 504,000 jobs but comes as Fed signals aggressive interest rate hikes in bid to tame inflationThe US’s hiring boom continued in February with employers adding another 311,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remaining close to its 50-year low at 3.6%.The number was sharply lower than the revised 504,000 new jobs the labor department announced were added in January, following months of slowed job growth. But it was far higher than the 220,000 economists had been expecting and comes as inflation has remained stubbornly high. The Federal Reserve has signaled it will continue to aggressively hike interest rates in its fight to cool the economy and bring down prices. Continue reading...

FDA to require information about density of breast tissue – which can make cancer harder to spot – to be given to patientsAll US women getting mammograms will soon receive information about their breast density observed during the test, which can sometimes make cancer harder to spot.The new requirements, finalized on Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration, are aimed at standardizing the information given to millions of women following regular scans to detect breast cancer. Continue reading...

By turning an armed invasion into a plucky underdog story, the classic war movie propagated a very dubious British mythologyThere’s an urban myth about a scene in Zulu in which a British officer in a red tunic is gruesomely struck in his throat by three successive spears: after a stunned silence in the cinema auditorium, a bloke is said to have shouted from the back: “One hundred and EIGHTY!” (Other versions of the story have an extra on location shouting it – and then getting fired – or even the star himself, Michael Caine.)Now the film is contending with more darts. Sir Michael Caine is furious at the news that Zulu, the 1964 film about the battle of Rorke’s Drift that made him an international star, has been named as something that could encourage far-right sympathies by the Research Information and Communications Unit, run as part of Prevent, the government’s counter-terror operation. Continue reading...

Emmy winner for Baretta was acquitted of 2001 shooting of Bonny Lee Bakley but found liable by a civil juryRobert Blake, the Emmy award-winning performer who was tried and acquitted in the killing of his wife, has died age 89.A statement released on behalf of his niece, Noreen Austin, said Blake died from heart disease, surrounded by family at home in Los Angeles. Continue reading...

US president expected to travel despite DUP’s boycott of power sharing and may also head to DublinJoe Biden is to visit Belfast to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement despite the Democratic Unionist party’s continued boycott of the power-sharing government that the peace pact established.The US president, who is of Irish heritage, is also expected to travel to Dublin as part of his wish to mark his family connection while in office. Continue reading...

Chancellor Olaf Scholz denounces ‘brutal act’ after suspected gunman found dead. Plus, the people who inherit hobbies from loved ones

It’s appalling to see the media lavish DeSantis with so much fawning coverage. Especially after all he has doneThe Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to brag that he’s just getting started with his rightwing agenda.“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” was how he put it in one recent speech.Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture Continue reading...

The breadth of these bills is staggering, and many go beyond their purported goals of protecting children from obscenityWhen Bill Lee donned a cheerleader uniform, fake pearls and a wig as part of high school senior year antics, he probably didn’t think the goofy costume would come back to bite him. But, more than 40 years later, the now governor of Tennessee is at the forefront of efforts to ban the innocent costumes he and his friends once wore, waging a battle that strikes at the heart of our first amendment freedoms.Since the beginning of this year, at least 32 bills have been filed in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia targeting drag performances, with more on the way. Continue reading...

Election could serve as a bellwether for how voters think about public safety as they choose between duelling approachesThere are few issues besides keeping a clean alley that most Chicagoans agree on. Yet, last week, a majority of the city’s voters ousted incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s mayoral primary.With just under 17% of the vote, Lightfoot became the first mayor to fail to advance to the runoff election since Jane Byrne lost the 1983 primary. But the recent election was not a stunning rebuke of Lightfoot, who commanded third place with a loyal base of mostly Black voters on the city’s South and West Sides, but a demand for a radically different approach toward combating crime amid pandemic recovery, with one candidate focused on law and order and the other hoping to boost the social safety net. Continue reading...

Proliferation of bills in Texas, Kentucky and elsewhere ‘exposes fundamental lie of anti-abortion movement’, experts sayFor decades, the mainstream anti-abortion movement promised that it did not believe women who have abortions should be criminally charged. But now, Republican lawmakers in several US states have introduced legislation proposing homicide and other criminal charges for those seeking abortion care.The bills have been introduced in states such as Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Some explicitly target medication abortion and self-managed abortion; some look to remove provisions in the law which previously protected pregnant people from criminalization; and others look to establish the fetus as a person from the point of conception. Continue reading...

Feelgood comedy Champions wins points for casting learning disabled actors – but Hollywood should be aiming higher than the way it treats their characters‘I wanna say the right thing but if I can’t call them the r-word, what can I call them?” Marcus (played by Woody Harrelson) is a basketball coach in court for drunk-driving and aggressive behaviour, and this is what he asks the judge rather pathetically at the beginning of his new movie Champions. “I suggest you call them by their names,” she replies tersely, sentencing him to 90 days’ community service coaching the Friends, a basketball team with learning disabilities. Wow – what a punishment! My heart bleeds.This is Marcus’s chance to redeem himself and ultimately, become A Good Guy. Within 90 days, he must halt his drink problem and stop resorting to violence when he doesn’t get his own way. Oh, and he’s a womaniser too – spending time with some disabled people will probably fix that as well, right? Yuck. Continue reading...

The lawn replacement – largely fallen out of favor in professional sports these days – contains large amounts of toxic chemicalsA report on a possible link between a rare brain cancer that killed six professional US baseball players and toxic chemicals in artificial turf is raising a new round of questions over whether synthetic sports fields pose a health threat to athletes and others who use them.The six athletes, who all died from glioblastoma, played most of their careers with the Philadelphia Phillies, a team that for decades competed on artificial turf in Veterans Stadium, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Continue reading...

The Ravens have left the door open for rivals to discuss terms with their star quarterback. But the market is suspiciously quietSomething is off with the Lamar Jackson situation.This week, the Baltimore Ravens hit Jackson, a former unanimous league MVP, with the non-exclusive franchise tag after failing to secure a long-term deal. It’s unprecedented. We haven’t seen a team put the non-exclusive tender on a quarterback this century. Continue reading...